Thanks
to some of the sharper-eared among you, ESD and
this website have gotten queries in regard to the
many restorations and changes that were made to
bring the original masters of this set up to date
for 20-bit audio. We're grateful for your interest.
Below we cover every aspect of cleaning and
polishing that went on, in more detail than the
average music lover would care about. Of course
many of you ARE more discerning than average, and
we hope this new page will cover any questions you
might have. It may even be an enjoyable challenge
to try to pick out the changes and repairs before
you read all about them here. Once you've learned
the behind-the-scenes details, though, I hope you
can then just sit back and enjoy the music!

Not
many of you will be that interested in the litany that
follows. Also, there will be some of you who probably will
be happier not
knowing about the touchups described below (the power of
suggestion and expectation can work against you, hence the
need for "double-blind testing".) But those with very sharp
ears may specifically pick up on several changes that were
made during the remastering process for our boxed set
(beyond noticing how good it sounds). These addressed both
audio and musical problems that had existed on all earlier
versions of the original albums. IMHO, these are all notable
improvements and repairs I've hoped to make for years.You will note that in
no case were any but the original master mixes used, the
very first generation tapes when the balances and positions
and reverb/ambiance were "locked-down" for good. (Next we
had to make compromise versions, copies adjusted carefully
to facilitate cutting reasonable LP's and prerecorded tapes.
Those compromise tape copies, with limiting, compression,
midrange-boosts and hi/low rolloffs, are what all other
CBS/Sony CD releases have originated from up until this new
deluxe edition.) For the
Switched-On
Boxed Set and the
single album editions (S-OB,
W-TS, S-OBII, S-OBrandys)
no "sweetening" or substitute additional notes or parts were
used anywhere (as Frank Zappa did some years ago,
consternating many fans and collectors). Nothing was
manipulated which could be considered as substitution of
original materials. That was the ground-plan: improve,
assist, clean & optimize, but don't alter the critical
essence.Please allow a me a
personal thought about all of what you'll read below. Yes, I
know that one can draw a line arbitrarily in many locations
between leaving a master tape exactly as it is, every wart
and zit more obvious with Hi-D sound than ever before, to
doing extensive reconstruction, until very little of the
original shape remains, so much cosmetic surgery has been
performed. So there may be some of you who would have drawn
the line slightly differently than I did here. For the most
thoughtful of you, I can only offer my comments here, as
honest and forthright as I know how. I hope you will be
pleased at the effort made to produce as fine a version of
the Switched-On
Collection as has
ever existed.For those of you for
whom music is an eidetic memory association experience, and
once memorized, not one jot or molecule can be altered at
all, I suspect only an original LP will satisfy. Make it the
particular LP that had each surface blemish irradiated into
your mind, such that to remove the smallest tick would be to
destroy a cherished, nostalgic experience. It's not easy to
have such acute ears. I do sympathize: this mastering
is
slightly "different" (that was the whole point, of course).
The CD is a more critical medium, and audio systems have
advanced in many ways over what existed when these albums
first came out. I don't think the changing times
CAN
be ignored, nor ought be.Anyway, I have given
this my best effort over many months of extremely cautious
work and auditioning, living with it. No snap decisions were
allowed, unless they stood up weeks later. Apologies if you
don't agree. This is all much, much closer to what we
originally intended back then, but had to be satisfied with
less. Ultimately, I can only paraphrase the outraged
playwright (Kenneth Mars) joke in Mel Brooks's witty first
film, "The Producers": I'm
the artist --I outrank you! This
new remastering has me feeling gleeful and happy, and I hope
you'll feel that way, too!On
Pitch Errors:
But ever since those first LP's and prerecorded tapes were
put out, I've had a few involuntary winces upon hearing
several small problems that had been let go, or were
impossible to render better back when the recordings were
made. As one obvious example, the incredibly difficult task
of trying to assure all of the first Moog Synth parts were
in tune, absolutely and with each other, was far from
perfect, and some of those errors have persisted until now.
The original Ampex 8-track recorder was actually a modified
1/2" machine, made to operate with 1", using new guides,
tape head stack, and rollers. It had difficulty maintaining
a constant 15 ips comparing the start of a reel to the end.
If you left the tape sections pretty much where they were
originally recorded this wasn't important. But if you took a
section recorded near the start of a reel, and made an
excellent splice to another section recorded near the end of
another reel (an extreme case), you could be assured of some
slight pitch change, apart from the synthesizer's
instability.There are perhaps 30
places where I noticed while remastering that the pitch of a
note or two, or some complete sections, were slightly out of
tune. That was obviously not our intention, but we did the
best we could with the limited tools we had. For the new
boxed set I continued to trim and adjust by a few tens of
cents of tuning the remaining more obvious spots which had
been abandoned. Now you may note that the pitches within
individual tracks are nicely consistent most of the time.
The worst offender, a major blunder in truth, was on
W-TS,
the initial track: Monteverdi's "Orfeo" Suite. Some of the
adjacent sections here were more than a quarter-tone
off-speed all these years -- yikes! Very embarrassing, but
next to impossible to fix with an old varispeed analog tape
equipment, which can generate wow and additional random
mistunings.To repair the
all-too-audible pitch errors of our Orfeo minisuite took two
days. None of the other repairs of pitch were nearly so
cussed nor extensive, just a few notes here and there, and
by but a few cents. I seem to be very sensitive to these
pitch things, with my experiences with alternative tunings,
so if none of this bothered you before, forget I even
brought it up now!
On
Hiss Reduction:
A more general kind of repair-work was the minimizing of
tape hiss, hum, and other low level distractions.
Unsurprisingly the noisiest masters were from the first
album, when we worked just before buying our first
Dolby
A301 noise reduction units. Everything recorded after the
masters for S-OB
used Dolby-A, with a great improvement in sound. I have
heard many albums that have been remastered with such
aggressive hiss removal that all semblance to the original
tapes has been lost. It's easy to get carried away here.
Since we can't practically remove all
the hiss, what should be the goal is to tame what remains,
to make it less noticeable, and preserve as much of the
original master as possible.I used one of the most
flexible audio tools for such a task, Arboretum's
Ionizer. This is a
tricky, yet powerful program that if used intelligently
allows you to tread very close to the optimum tweaks for
every bit of sound on the original masters, while dropping
the most objectionable hiss by a few dB. I didn't use it as
an automatic "blanket" device, but selected individual
phrases and regions that were fairly consistent, then
adjusted to obtain modest improvements, and saved several
versions. I compared each such section over many days,
coming at each audition freshly, and choosing what now
seemed the most reasonable version of those best attempts,
occasionally taking an additional pass.So what you will hear
is that some tracks have essentially no audible hiss left.
Cool. Others retain a bit of hiss, but it's much less than
ever before. If you tried to remove much more, the music
would suffer. I assume most of you would prefer not to go
that far (yes?). Finally, I hand-reduced a great many very
brief snippets, quiet pauses, the reverberating tail-off of
a piece, a moment when hiss increased just before a new
sound entered, since I must have raised some (rotary)
faders. Now less than a second of this type of lead-in has
the hiss dropped a bit more than what comes before or after
that entrance, kinda subtle stuff.There was very little
hiss on most of the later masters, with the exception of the
"Air" from Handel's "Water Music" on W-TS.
That piece mixed together too many low-signal additional
tracks which contained some EQ boost, and has had a noisy
background as a result. It took several days to "nail" that
track's hiss by an optimal amount. The "Air on a G-String"
from S-OB
was even worse, but came out surprisingly well. Those were
the most difficult to denoise complete tracks on the
set.A special consideration
was given to the opening minute of our 3rd Brandenburg
performance. This initial movement is demonstrated on the
final track of CD #I, in which musicological concerns
expressed by Folkman (Bach would seldom double melodic lines
8va and 15 ma, for ex.) led to the opening being synthesized
with no
pitches above a standard 8'
(damn!). That means we included no subtle additive overtones
as analog synth timbres often require, and the opening is
muddier and murkier than I desired. If it weren't for our
remastering policy (as
stated above): not
to add or replace any original material, more could have
been done. This policy also is why the ending notes of the
Invention in F, described
below, remain
slightly compromised. I was sorely tempted to "sneak in" a
few 4' and 2' doublings during the remastering of that first
page, but knew this opened the door of a Pandora's Box (bad
enough to have a ridiculously bright Siamese cat
namedPandora!
;^).Instead all I did for
now was to add a slight aural exciter effect, with some very
carefully considered high frequency boost of the affected
portion. This lightened the passages somewhat, but brought
up additional hiss as well. So a tradeoff was made, reducing
the added hiss a bit, brightening the remainder slightly
more, until diminishing returns set in. It isn't perfect,
but the opening of this movement now is the best it's ever
sounded. After page one, I insisted we clearly needed
some
of those higher octave overtones, if only like soft organ
stops and mixtures, and Ben finally relented. So everything
gradually becomes brighter, and no more cautious enhancement
was needed beyond a gentle hiss-reduction, a few mini
off-pitch fixes, and restoration of the original master
tape's "buried treasures."
On
Hum & Thumps:
When listening at loud monitor levels I discovered a few
hums and low-thumps, too. These were simply inaudible on the
small monitors I used while recording those masters that had
them. Oops! So the same kind of care used to reduce hiss
where it was found also went into these spots that contained
hum. Some 60/120 Hz leakage on one of the tracks of the old
Ampex machine occasionally became audible throughout
W-TS.
It was not a happy surprise to discover this after we'd
gotten the big new Klipsh monitor system installed in the
brownstone studio, and were playing that master which had
sounded decent in the first studio.Since these hums were
intermittent, no single setting of hum rolloff back then
would have been reasonable, without harming all of a track.
I was generally loathe to do any such changes anyway, as
they automatically accrued a generation loss going to a
"new" master tape. It's wonderful at last to have been able
to locate these, the ones that were most noticeable, and
slightly nudge them down a bit, until you really won't hear
them anymore. Once again, I made several varieties of these
cleanups, and auditioned them again over several days,
before choosing the best one to use.

On
Teensy Ticks/Pops:
With our new monitor system we also became aware that the
first two albums had some peculiar tiny ticks and pops
within the music in many places. These were not so
noticeable at that time. But for this project, once those
tapes were mastered to 20-bit "Hi-D" sound, I became all too
aware that on an ultra decent CD master the formerly
"insignificant" ticks were not easy to ignore. They began to
drive me nuts! Where were they coming from? Hard to track
down...It turned out that they
were on individual tracks of the multitrack tapes, and could
be heard just as slower attack patches began, at the exact
point when the Moog keys were depressed, in fact. A
hard-attack sound hid them. It was only in certain patches
that these audible bugs were generated along with the notes.
I'd just not noticed them on the first two albums with the
modest speakers I was using (this is a lesson to all of you
who master your own music: be sure your monitors are
faithful and of decent quality!)Okay, small ticks
existed at the start of certain Moog patches, mostly the
softer, slower pieces on the first two albums,
W-TS
especially. Hundreds of them. What to do? I really don't
trust any automatic program for taking out more than really
obvious pops and clicks, such as transferring of old LP's
and film soundtracks to digital. These things were very
subtle. To remove them would risk removing some music as
well.Time for the old Pencil
Tool... Ouch! Yup, this tedious method is what I did, for
three weeks, going carefully over each track for the set,
and whenever I found some of these rascals, I'd go through
probing the waveform, trying to center the teensy intruder
on screen, which is hard to do. In most cases once you'd
enlarged it enough, you could see the distinctive "twidget"
right there on screen. Yeay! Fire! Usually you saw a few
minuscule spikes, like a little damped wavelet that was
barely there, but too easily heard. Then you'd have to draw
it out, or pop an extremely brief low-pass filter on the
millisecond affected, to kill it. Check playback before and
after a few times. If not undetectable, try it again. You'd
get to be pretty expert after the second or third 12-14 hour
day of this... :^)There were a few I just
couldn't remove completely. I reduced what I could, and just
went on, as what now remained was very hard to hear, unless
you know exactly where to find it. These are all extremely
small fixes, but in some passages where it sounded like
birdseed being dropped onto a tin plate (hey, I'm
exaggerating!), all is now smooth and lovely, and in
retrospect the tedium was well worth it (no, honestly).
On
Individual Note Glitches:
During the recording of S-OB,
I often worked with Ben (Folkman) there, at all hours of
night and day, frequently overtired and frustrated with
equipment nightmares long past. I must confess to being
fairly influenced by a collaborator (with Rachel we were
BOTH obsessive, thus "no note was permitted to survive until
it was near-perfect!"). Ben was far more pragmatic than us,
so my obsessing over every detail must have driven him nuts.
He often would say after a reasonable take: "that's just
fine, let's move on". Most of the time he certainly was
right. But there are several places where I was not
satisfied then, nor later when I heard the LP release, nor
when listening to the album years later. I should have
fought for another take or two to get it in fact "correct",
not merely close enough. But I deferred
(and
probably carried a bit of a grudge all these years, to
remember and bring up such petty issues here and
above,
on the opening
of Brandy #3).There are two passages
especially clumsy, both in the Violin I part of the Brandy
#3 third movement, where the 32nd note passages occur. The
final uppermost note of both of these passages is "fluffed"
on the master, barely played, as it was exceedingly
difficult to do with that old clunker of a keyboard.
Grr...'s for years. Now I wondered if on the digital audio
workstation (DAW) it might be reasonable to try to repair
these fluffs at long last.Indeed, it was! You'll
barely notice, assuming you ever did before, those mis-keyed
two notes. I could boost them in level and tricky EQ
peakings that made you think you were hearing those
exceedingly short notes played as they ought have been
played. I didn't believe at first that I could get away with
such a simple, if time-consuming trick, and saved a few
versions plus the original once again, to listen to the next
day or two. The best of these is nearly undetectable, and no
longer do I wince when hearing them. In fact I have
difficulty finding them now, which implies they're pretty
decent. Big sigh of relief! Boldened, I touched up a few
similar spots on a few other isolated notes that were not so
badly played, but could use a similar fix, too. In an age
that permits punch-ins and edits and copies and looping,
this kind of careful blemish repair seems to me to be called
for and a wonderful gift.While these individual
note touch ups above were done to repair performance fluffs,
I also discovered that the modest monitor speakers I had
been using were inadequate to judge the levels of very low
bass parts. With my Velodyne subwoofers (amazing, amazing
speakers!) I've found a lot of recent orchestral recordings
contain stage or traffic sounds, thumps and rumbles and the
like (c'mon, people, get some decent speakers!). It was also
obvious that several notes on the first two albums for this
set, had inconsistent levels. Some were much too loud in
context and muddy, others were not as deep and resonant as I
had thought they were.It was quite easy to go
in and touch up the lowest octave a very little on the
offensive notes, to fix that which I'd have caught
originally if I'd had excellent monitors as I do now (you
don't find them on the third and fourth albums, for
example). Also, once all the tracks were collected together
for the whole set, I became aware that some pieces were
either overall too bassy, or not bassy enough, similar with
the overall loudness, to match with all the other tracks.
This was a good chance to bring all the tracks into better
alignment with one another, so you can now jump from
selection to selection and not feel an urgent need to touch
your volume or tone controls.On
Tempo Glitches:
The majority of cleanups made on the boxed set were for
audio reasons, as you've read. But there were also a few
minor places where I had to touch up a raw-sounding tempo
shift that had been intended properly, but came out faulty.
As you must know, tempo is tied to the pitch (and timbre) of
most recordings. Change the speed and you slow down but also
become flatter, and vice-versa. I recall that we had been
forced to allow to stand several notes, generally in a
ritard or allargando, that were unintentionally a little
uneven and inelegant. The only choice, to do the whole thing
over, was something you did only if the problem was very
noticeable. We had to do that nightmare often enough, but
got better at preplanning our special click tracks, with
experience.Even so, there still
exist those mildly clumsy tempo spots. I had repaired one of
the worst already last year: the trailing off end for the
speeded-up "William Tell Overture" on Clockwork
Orange betrayed a
clumsy several notes. I just went in on remastering and
spaced them as the intention had been, a matter of a few
milliseconds of shifting here and there. Much better now,
and honestly what we intended in the first place, but were
thwarted by the earlier technology. Some of the same thing
exists on the Bach/Baroque selections, perhaps six spots
over this complete set. It was not too hard to repair these,
as none of them was more than a few percent of change. Only
an obsessive compulsive like me would notice or care enough
to dive in to such microsurgery these many years later, what
the heck. I can only say I'm relieved and much happier than
I've ever before felt about these selections, no
kidding!There
is but one such repair that I expect any of you might notice
(congrats if you did, it's a brief change). That piece ought
not to have been allowed on the final tape for
S-OB
in the first place. We did it for sentimental reasons, as
this was the very first Bach piece we'd attempted, but also
because it was fun. I refer to the "Two-Part Invention in
F". This was truly a "baby piece", using a non
touch-sensitive keyboard (the only such on the set) played
in mono, sound on sound (pre-multitrack) with no click
track, rechanneled into stereo after the fact. Yet it was
fun, and short enough not to outstay its welcome.But we had difficulty
trying to get the ritard right at the end (not to say last
chord, which I had to cheat), and grudgingly settled for the
version you know. That ending happens to be momentarily kind
of embarrassing for us, even if one may get used to the
clumsiness (just play it over and over... ;^). If I could
have, I'd have inserted one of our more graceful and natural
sounding ritards. Even now there's but so much you can do
(oh, no, another compromise!). It still seemed worth a try.
I spent many hours on those last two or three notes, trying
to stretch, space and underline them with a bit of brief EQ
so that it felt more human and less like the mistake it
actually was (including an early tape edit "repair" that
didn't help one whit).The new master acquired
a small amount of reverb-repetition on the next-to-last note
for just under a millisecond, which I hand-smoothed as much
as possible. I tried a few variations, and again came back
to listen and compare with the original over a week, to pick
the best. The original goof was something we certainly knew
about, and flinched about, and talked about, after fussing
about to no avail. For the first time it is now very nearly
what we'd tried to do on our modest experiment, before
Switched-On
anything had been invented.
On
the Ending Tails:
I was surprised that many of the final tracks that we'd done
for the Brandenburg set had one notable weakness: the
fade-away of reverb at the endings sounded a little abrupt,
and clipped. It had become necessary during the middle 70's
to use some single ended noise reducing equipment at times,
as we had begun to experience some RF noises and buzzes out
of the blue. Drove us crackers! We discovered that the house
next door had installed high-wattage lights on solid-state
dimmers, and these would transmit a horrid hash of RF
frequencies into our equipment! At night, when they would go
to bed, the ugly noises ceased.But we often had to
work continuously, and would pick up some noises here and
there, if the music had silences or fade-aways in certain
places. Later we got an electronics wizard (Chuck Harrison)
to come help us reduce the equipment's vulnerability to
detect such noise signals, and this helped enormously.
(Better still, my current studio's a "Faraday Cage", and is
immune to all such problems!) But we often heard some noise
at the very end of the reverberating tail-offs of selections
that ended very loudly, then slowly faded away into silence.
We were forced to edge the tail down somewhat faster than
we'd have liked, using the master fader. At the time it
seemed reasonable. But on the 20-bit masterings, you could
hear that the last bit of tail had been truncated
slightly.For the new set, I've
restored these long tails with the same equipment that
produced them originally. Only the last note is affected in
each case, as it decays and fades away. It's not a crucial
series of repairs, but certainly on the newest wide-dynamic
range equipment, it's a graceful way to restore what had
been intended, but had to be compromised for technical and
practical reasons.